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She survived rape. They don't let her forget it

TNN

Jan 11, 2019, 17:06 IST

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They knew who she was.
The girl who had been raped. It didn't matter that all she wanted now was to leave the nightmare behind and like any other 15-year-old go to school, have a pizza with friends, catch a movie on the weekends.
So they followed her, three men on a bike, as she headed home from a coaching centre in Ghaziabad. It wasn't even too late. At 5.30 pm, the city is abuzz with people and activity, that too on a Saturday. They teased her, called her names, finally stopped her scooter and took away the key. And they touched her. She panicked. Some people, hearing the commotion, gathered and the louts fled. But once the crowd had dispersed, the three men started trailing her again. Until she reached home.
It had happened earlier too. That time two men had accosted her. They also knew who she was. One of them had then leered, "You are that girl from the Bulandshahr incident, aren't you?"
She was. And there was nothing she could do about it. In July 2016, six members of her family travelling from Noida to a place in UP were waylaid by criminals. The menfolk were tied up and the miscreants had pounced on the girl, then 13, and her mother. It had made national headlines.
The girl is not alone in her trauma that refuses to go away. Survivors of rape, however much the media -- thanks to strict laws now about it -- hides their identity, are inevitably pinned down by the unforgiving, judgmental, relentless eyes of society and the wolves it hides. They are shamed, victimised all over again and, worst of all, thought by many as "easy prey", making real rehabilitation almost impossible.

Shabnam's story is as cruel. She lived with her husband and children in a small house in Thane. In August 2017, on a day of festivities, she was assaulted by a man from the locality, beaten nearly unconscious for resisting and then raped. A police case was filed and the accused was arrested, but it was only the beginning of Shabnam's ordeal.
“Some local goons started passing comments in public, saying I had a relationship with the accused. One day my husband came home drunk and asked me if it was true. I broke down,” said Shabnam. She stopped going out in public or meeting anyone.
“There is no place for a rape survivor. Society doesn't let her live. What was my fault? I was the one who was attacked and raped, but people didn't want me to take control of my life again,” said Shabnam. “My husband slowly stopped talking to me. He would be angry all the time and not speak to the children either. So one day I asked him to send me to my parents’ house. He promised to come back when things became better. It has been more than a year, but he has not returned.” The children live with the husband, who has ignored their requests to bring their mother back.

Whether it is Ghaziabad, Thane or Mumbai, the story is as sinister as it is similar. On most days, Naina does not step out of her south Mumbai home. She does the cooking and chores and looks after her aged mother. The only time she ventures out is to buy groceries and essentials. After she quit her job at a realty marketing firm two years ago, no organisation has been keen to hire her. It all began after Naina lodged a complaint against her former boss for drugging her in a Pune hotel, raping her and shooting an obscene video clip. The police probe never took off as Naina couldn't travel to Pune when investigators summoned her. Instead, colleagues incessantly hounded her; she lost her friends and ended up at a mental health professional's clinic with severe depression.
After Powai police refused to file an FIR, Naina finally got it registered at another police station, from where the case was transferred to Pune, but cops did not cooperate in the investigation. By then, some of her colleagues had started turning against her. “They would ask what my motive was behind the complaint. The survivor is always questioned, not the rapist,” she said.
Activist Mohan Krishnan, who has worked for victims of sexual abuse, said it doesn’t help that the police's attitude is usually anti-survivor from the moment she sets foot inside a thana to file a complaint. “Women officers are rarely available to record a rape complaint. The survivor gets uncomfortable narrating her ordeal to a male officer. Using the correct words while writing a victim's statement is crucial, which the cops don't always do,” he added.

In 2017, a woman was gang-raped by 8 men who also sexually assaulted her 14-year-old son. They were booked on November 14, 2017 under sections related to rape and the POCSO Act. Six of the accused are still absconding. The woman alleged that she was beaten up by policemen who wanted her to withdraw the case as the main accused is politically connected. Eventually, she and her son had to leave their town after repeated taunts by neighbours and propositions by men. She was never provided counseling by the Haryana women’s welfare department.
Sometimes it is the police that reveals the identity of survivors to people. A 14-year-old in Rohtak was gang-raped by five youths in 2018. Afterwards, her parents and elder sister lost their daily wage jobs and were forced out of the house by the landlord. Worse, police let out her identity to locals. Now she is propositioned for sex by youths and men since almost everybody knows her identity. The family survives on charity.
“More than the crime, the police made our life hell. They came to our house for investigation. They made our father accompany them to our hometown in West Bengal to get my sister’s certificate to verify her caste, against the high court’s directions,” said the elder sister of the survivor, also a minor.
In 2014, then 18 and succeeding in academics, Divya was gang-raped by five men in a UP town. She could never resume her education. “All my classmates knew I had been raped,” she said.
Sanjay Sharma, the advocate who fought Divya’s case for free, said, “Almost all rape survivors go through the same problems. Most of them have to drop out of educational institutions, others leave their home town. Though there are girls who come out strong, most of them require years to regain their confidence.”

In all this, though, there are some who stand out for their grit, determination and "sheer strength of soul", as Pooja, a survivor, put it.
She still trembles when narrating events that followed after she was raped at 16 by a stranger in Rishikesh 10 year ago. “The day after the rape, I told my sister and brother-in-law about it. The same evening, when my sister had gone out of the house, my brother-in-law raped me. He said I had already lost my honour, so it hardly made a difference. I did not know who to turn to. My sister threw me out of the house,” Pooja said at a shelter for women in Dehradun.
That was the start. The investigating officer raped her. “He told me he will speed up the investigation. ‘And anyway’ he told me, ‘nobody will marry you now. Then a number of constables also raped me. This continued for a year-and-half.” The investigation was botched up and the case never reached court. Pooja escaped from Rishikesh and approached an NGO, Samadhan, which works with survivors.
But that was then. Pooja not only went on to complete her LLB, but is today a successful lawyer. "I mostly take up cases of sexual violence," she said. "I was down and I got up. So can the women for whom I fight in court."

Names have been changed to protect identity.(With reports from Neha Salaria in Chandigarh, Nitasha Natu in Mumbai, Ishita Bhatia in Meerut, Pradeep Gupta in Kalyan, Prashant Jha in Dehradun)

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